PageRank Sculpting Is Dead
June 29th, 2009One thing you have to get used to in the Search Marketing industry are the continual changes implemented by search engines. What might have worked a year ago, may not work right now. Case in point is PageRank Sculpting.
Lisa Barone attended SMX Advanced in early June and during a Q&A session with Matt Cutts, an official spokesperson for Google, found that he (or Google) does not support PageRank Sculpting. This doesn’t mean however, that your site will get penalized if you have implemented PageRank Sculpting on it.
Essentially Google is saying that PageRank Sculpting is not useful anymore and that it is better use of one’s time to fix the website’s architecture in the first place.
PageRank Sculpting is a technique where a nofollow tag is applied to internal links within the site to prevent spiders from crawling or passing PageRank from one page to another. If you had 10 links on the site and half of them are nofollowed, then the theory is that all the PageRank will flow to the 5 that have no nofollow tags. This essentially boosts the importance of the pages that have not been nofollowed and increases the chances of them ranking in search results.
Matt Cutt says, “Your leftover PageRank will now evaporate”. Essentially you can’t direct PageRank where you want it to go. PageRank Sculpting just isn’t effective anymore. It is far more effective to create new content for your website, rather than bend and shape the flow of PageRank.
In my opinion, it is best to follow Matt Cutt’s advice. I would rather focus my energy and time on developing a great website that has engaging content and has useful functionality. This will grab the attention of users and the media who will want to share it with other like minded people.
